


Bruised

by dilangley



Series: Bruce and Diana in DCEU [5]
Category: DC Cinematic Universe, Justice League (2017)
Genre: F/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 08:25:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12766983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilangley/pseuds/dilangley
Summary: "No matter the relationships made, when the world fell apart, they knew she did not belong. They would die to keep her alive: human sacrifices at the altar of a goddess. Bruce had just played his part in a long-standing pageant of mortals and gods."Diana and Bruce fix the emotional and physical damages done in the battle against Steppenwolf.[oneshot; stands alone]





	Bruised

Only after everyone left did Diana allow herself to consider it.

Bruce had taken off in a plane with the intention of drawing away the parademons. Perhaps he had not wanted to die, but he had certainly been willing.

For a man who spoke to her so flippantly, so arrogantly, of her grief, he knew nothing about it. 

If he did, he would not have expected her to watch another human die so she could carry on. She did not make the same mistakes twice.

Diana leaned against the sink in the Batcave’s bathroom, observed her face in the mirror, unlined and beautiful after these years. As much as she loved humanity and as much as she could hate it, she stood apart. After all, humans do not spend time contemplating their relationship with humanity.

But Bruce made her feel human. She saw long-watched interactions mirrored in theirs: the softness of shared coffee early in the morning, the comfortable quiet of two people reading in the same room, the sparkle of may-I-have-this-dance at a benefit. To say she had grown to care for him understated it. She believed in him, saw the goodness integral to all his creaky parts, and she had believed he saw the same in her. Their friendship could be built on human flaws and foibles.

Then he had taken on a suicide mission.

No matter the relationships made, when the world fell apart, they knew she did not belong. They would die to keep her alive: human sacrifices at the altar of a goddess. Bruce had just played his part in a long-standing pageant of mortals and gods. It was no betrayal.

Yet anger hummed under her skin as she exited the bathroom and made her way to Bruce’s room, uninvited. She opened the door without knocking.

“You could at least pretend to ask permission.”

He stood next to the chair, stripped down to the thin, synthetic suit molded against his skin, its fabric calculated down to his nearest inch. Bruce measured the world more like Cyborg than like other men, and yet he could not quantify his own importance. If she had not been quivering with resentment, she might have spared a chuckle as the phrase “blind as a bat” came to mind.

“You were reckless today.” She closed the door behind her, though they were already alone. 

“I was prepared to do whatever it took to save the world.”

Diana shook her head. “You tried to be a martyr when what we needed was for you to live.”

He frowned. “The team has you. It has Clark. It was a different world when Gotham needed The Batman to survive. Now an alien from Kansas and an Amazon from Paradise can save it from things I never could.”

“If you truly believed that, you would not have believed your death was necessary today. You would have believed I could save the world and you. You did not have faith.”

“I’ve never been much for faith.”

“It’s time you started. You asked me if I learned my lessons in grief from Steve Trevor.” His name snagged in her throat, caught on her vocal cords and made them vibrate a few seconds too long. “You should not have said it. You should not have used stories I have not yet told you against me. But to answer your question, yes, I did. I learned that sacrifice saves the strangers and destroys the friends. It is better to fight and die together.”

Bruce’s voice softened, reached out to her like an olive branch. “You wish you had died with him?”

She stuck her chin up. “Don’t project yourself onto me. I wish he had lived.”

Diana watched Bruce’s face flicker with his own pains, and she wondered if he ever thought of it that way. Did he play a zero sum game in his head with each death he encountered? Was it either him or his parents? Him or Jason Todd? Him or Clark Kent? She pitied him. When she closed her eyes at night and the dreams came, Steve often arrived with them, alive and smiling, reading the paper, kissing the curve of her collarbone. She could not imagine if her dreams instead required her to die so that Steve might live.

“Of course.” Bruce’s reply came slowly. “I’m sorry.”

She waited. They stared one another down. He continued.

“I should have shared my plan with the team. I need to learn to do that. And I should not have lost my temper. When I brought up Steve, I was wrong.”

With his apology complete, she could accept it. She felt the smile curve onto her lips. “Perhaps Clark can teach you how to get along with others.”

“Funny. You’re a funny woman,” Bruce muttered, eyes narrowing. She watched him take a step backward, stiff as a board, a wince flashing through his eyes. Suddenly she knew why he had not finished changing; it had not been her interruption at the door.

“Let me help.” 

She expected him to rebuff the offer, but instead he nodded. She moved behind him and reached out for the fabric, considered the amount of wriggling and pulling over his head this skintight material would require. Grasping the back in both hands, she ripped it cleanly apart instead.

“Jesus, Diana. I was just thinking you’d help me lift it over my head.”

She did not answer. Bruises splashed across his skin, multi-colored paint coating a canvas, and dried blood crusted around splits in the skin along his shoulder blades, clotted reminders of impacts with walls. Yet even under this tapestry, she could see the scars. A four-inch gnarled lump of scar tissue stretched across his lower back as if someone had tried to carve out his kidney with a blunt instrument. 

Bruce knew a thing or two about sacrificing himself for greater good.

She thought of her own flawless skin, of Clark emerging from the Kryptonian ship unmarred by even death, and in that moment, Bruce’s humanity humbled her.

“What do you put on your bruises?” The tenderness in her voice surprised her.

“There’s salve in the top drawer of the dresser,” Bruce said. “I can reach most of them.”

“I think there’s more than you realize,” she said simply.

Upon opening the drawer, she took in the assortment of supplies, everything from gauze to prescription narcotics to labeled jars. She turned one over in her hand, read Bruce’s tidy handwriting on the white label: “For potentially contaminated cuts.” Another read “For poison ivy.” She held it up.

“The plant or the villain?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m a civilized man. It would be capitalized if it was the villain.”

She smiled to herself, nodding, and searched until she found the correct jar. Its contents were mustard yellow and smelled strongly of comfrey and arnica. She wrinkled her nose.

He sat down on the bed, holding the ripped halves of his shirt in surprisingly fidgety hands.

“You don’t have to take care of me. I wouldn’t ask it of…” She raised a hand to cut him off as she sat down. 

“You wouldn’t ask it of anyone, but I hope you would not be too stubborn to accept it. This is what warriors do. I would ask the same of you.”

He seemed satisfied by the answer and turned his back towards her.

As she set to work on his bruises, she marveled at how man’s misogyny had shaped the world. Tending to a comrade’s wounds could be seen as subservient simply because she was a woman, as if the care of others was not everyone’s work. On Themyscira, she and her sisters had often massaged tension out of one another’s muscles, stitched the cuts of training exercises, and soothed battered, bruised skin. Of course, in her youthful naivete, she had never noticed how often her training partners were the ones most in need of this care. Her mother’s wish to shield her had kept her ignorant of her gifts.

Yet it was different to sit here with him, her fingers pressing into his skin, smoothing the smelly medicine into each bruise. She slid her salve-slick fingers along a deep black welt up his side, and he shivered. Goosebumps rose to life across his skin.

She wanted to say _You cannot keep surviving beatings like this._

“I’ve been in much worse shape before,” Bruce said. “So you can stop worrying so loudly.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You don’t have much of a poker face.” He shifted when she pressed on a new bruise and then spoke again. “I broke my back ten years ago.”

She swallowed down the instinctive sympathy and pity and instead chose a pleasantly neutral tone. “Tell me the story.”

And he did. Though not born of oral traditions like the Amazons, he told the story well, matching the rhythm of his voice to the pacing of her work. She learned of his struggles against Bane, the slow progress of his recovery under Alfred’s care, the hard-won victory on the other side of so much pain. 

When he finished, she shared a story too, the story of the Themysciran beach and the death of Antiope. She tried to paint the picture for him of beautiful beaches breached by dark-coated soldiers. She wanted him to feel the ferocity and bravery of the Amazons in the face of weapons they had never before seen. 

He told the story of his first night as Batman. She told the story of her first battle as Wonder Woman.

Somewhere in the peaceful shared ritual of their tales, Diana finished his bruises, and he got up stiffly to change. She noticed that he opted for a black button-down shirt to avoid having to raise his arms above his head. He managed a pair of jeans fairly easily. The faintest of blushes brushed itself across his cheeks, and she realized too late that his Puritanical American modesty made him uncomfortable with her watching while he changed. He came back to sit down with a glass of water, not whiskey, for each of them. His eyes asked her to keep talking, to continue this lull between them.

Each story turned a key and unlocked another story.

She told the story of World War II and her decision to leave mankind to its own devastating devices. He told the story behind his quest to kill Superman. 

He told the story of his parents’ deaths in a cold alleyway, gunned down before his eyes, and she told the story of Steve Trevor, blown apart 100 yards above a hangar in Belgium.

And as her story ended, they sat together in silence, the intimacy of it all leaving them between what they had been and what they had just become. Either of them could have offered platitudes, acknowledgements of the pain the other had borne, but none of the words could have described the understanding now between them. 

She took in the planes of his face, the inscrutable dark of his eyes.

“Thank you for saving me today.” He did not look away with the embarrassment or hesitation of a lesser man but met her gaze squarely. 

“You’re welcome.”

“I’ll save you next time.”

“I’ll put it on my calendar.”

And finally, they both broke into the well-earned, well-worn smiles of victory they should have worn all along.

**Author's Note:**

> I enjoyed the movie, and I felt like the scene where Diana fixed Bruce's dislocated shoulder needed another of its sort after the battle with Steppenwolf. There surely was a lot that still needed to be said between these two.
> 
> DCEU is slow-burning us so good, friends.


End file.
